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BIG BEAR’S BIG BIRTHDAY BASH Event


HAPPY BIRTHDAY BIG BEAR!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BIG BEAR!

GC3B571 BIG BEARS BIG BIRTHDAY BASH by Tru2Cntry.

BIG BEAR’s birthday is no small event, at least it isn’t anymore! I thought it would be fun to celebrate BIG BEAR’s Birthday with all of our Geocaching Family. Neither BIG BEAR or I have family close by, and we love being with our Geocaching Family and Friends so we invited everybody to celebrate his birthday with us.

We published the Event and found out that there were 7 other birthday’s all within a month of BIG BEAR’s birthday. Well Geocaching friends are such great people, that’s one of the reason’s Geocaching is fun to do. Shampoodles and Ponytails, painted some great Geocaching rocks for the Gift Bags. We had a lot of Geocaches on the raffle table thanks to: OlCowboy, Georooks, Shampoodles, Ponytails, Dakotachix, Jeeperjones and Rat&Mushroom brought their signature Ammo Cans! Whoo Hoo… the raffle table was filling up!

I rented the Round Table Pizza Party room for 2 hours: 7-9 pm, I arrived at 6 to decorate and found out that they didn’t have my reservation for that day and time… so we just started filling up the tables and booths out in the Pizza restauraant area. And there was a birthday party already using the Party room that wasn’t scheduled to leave for another 2 hours… good thing we are flexible. The Manager at Round Table was awesome, “Penny” took over the sitution and the group with the birthday party left and hour earlier than they had planned. Thank you for that!

Geocachers were showing up left and right, no time to decorate, or so I thought. Lets just pick up our stuff and move to the Party room. Once in the room, Shampoodles, Ponytails and so many others started helping me decorate, I think Tink1914 team was putting up Party Zone banners, Shampoodles and I were putting down the table cloths. It was starting to look like a birthday party!!

RAT & MUSHROOM, Mushroom has a "Mush" stach!

RAT & MUSHROOM, Mushroom has a "Mush" stach!

While everybody ordered their pizza‘s and salads, we started things off with a Geocaching Bingo game mixer which I got here: Geocaching Online Resource Directory: Printables. For those who got a BINGO I had made custom Key Chain Lanyards with their Geocaching name on them to get as a prize, they were a hit!

After everybody had gotten their fill of Pizza I grabbed BIG BEAR and asked him to Emcee the Raffle. BIG BEAR is a natural at Emceeing! He had a great time calling out the numbers and having fun with everyone.

BIG BEAR emcees the raffle

BIG BEAR emcees the raffleCantseem helps BIG BEAR with the raflleBIG BEAR and OlCowboy

BIG BEAR & T2C with the Cake

BIG BEAR & T2C with the CakeBIG BEAR's Cake!

BIG BEAR blowing out the candles

BIG BEAR blowing out the candles

Now it’s time for the Birthday cake and Ice Cream. BIG BEAR didn’t know about the cake. Dakotachix and I were putting the candles on and lighting them while the raffle was winding down. As soon as the candles were lit we broke into the “Happy Birthday to You” song and brought the cake in. It was a Bear cake made out of Cupcakes, with a Garmin 60csx in one hand and a blue iPhone in the other hand with a T-Shirt that read: FTF on it! The cupcakes went fast, and then I forgot to bring out the ice cream. I took it home and BIG BEAR had some later, so all is good there.

Overall there were over 45 people that came, 2 hours was a little to short, I think next time I will do a 4 hour Event and I will get there 2 hours early to set up. I am not sure but it seemed like everybody got there an hour early, so if I want to decorate I need to be there way ahead of time to do it.

But what a great time we had, Thank you to all our Geocaching family for coming and honoring BIG BEAR and for contributing to the fun. We are going to make this an annual Event and have already started planning next year’s event!!

BIG BEAR at Firestone GC78


BIG BEAR A

GC78 Firestone by Scott Hinds

BIG BEAR’s birthday wish was to do this cache, it was published 10/02/2000 called Firestone.  It is located near Bodega Bay, North of San Francisco. So after biking the Golden Gate park earlier in the day, we jumped in the Jeep and headed north up Hwy 1 to the cache location.  The road into the cache was winding but it was a beautiful drive.

This was rated a 1/1 but we parked at the closest point and walked over, looked down and thought no way this is a 1 terrain.  We did see a trail though and later found out if you parked at the Trail Head (which we passed on the way up to the cache) that you could have an easy hike into this cache that was a terrain of 1.    Since we were at the closest point we through caution to the wind and started our way down to the cache, our terrain was about a 4.  It was very steep, but the views were extraordinary… it was beautiful.  There was no fog and we got there just about Sunset to witness one of the prettiest views of the ocean.

There aren’t too many of these old caches left and this one filled in a spot, or rather a date on our “Finds by Placed Month” calendar.  The caches with the older years for 2000 and 2001 are few and far between.  They were published when Geocaching was just beginning and now are very sought after caches.  On Firestone at the time there are only 260 finds for the cache.  For being published 11 years ago you would think there would be a lot more finds.  I hope this cache stays active, the owner has stated on his cache page that he has moved and it is difficult for him to maintain it, the Geocaching family is pretty good however at helping to maintain caches if they know that the owner can’t do it himself.  Trying to fill in the Jasmer Challenge Calendar: GC1GBC1 The Jasmer Challenge (Northern California Edition) by jasmerb

This cache for me will be remembered for not only the numbers it fills in for me but the memory of one of the most beautiful spots I have ever been to, and we ended the day by watching the sun go down. Perfect ending to a perfect caching day and it was a great way to honor my best friend’s birthday!

Happy Birthday BIG BEAR!

New Year – New Caching Adventure!


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New Years day typically starts off with getting together with friends and family and watching football,  or just relaxing after a hectic Christmas season.  This year we fired up the Jeeps, called our Geocaching Friends and said the weather is perfect lets go off road and grab some 5 star terrain Geocaches!  5 Star Terrain ususally means you need a high clearance 4 wheel drive vehicle which is why we all have Jeeps!!  What a blast this was, 7 Jeeps, 12 Geocachers: BIG BEAR, Lookout4 and Anna, Teco_mac, Cantseem, Playcache 1&2, JeeperJones 1&2, Crowshoot & Floflower… oh and Tru2Cntry,  2 non Geocachers (hey they have a Jeep, they qualify!) Lets all meet at 12:00 at the OHV4 Staging Area.

OHV4 Staging Area Meeting Place
Ok, we are all here… let the fun begin!


Playcache

Teco_mac & Cantseem in my Jeep

Don & Liz

Crowshoot & Floflower

Now that we all made it up the gnarley part of the road, lets get to the Geocaches!!

GC2T00Z dakotas wreck site by cheater rick.

GCQEDE Route 4 – Most Difficult by dzdiver

GC2QADG T2C Hits 3000 by BIG BEAR.

GC396G7 WELCOME TO 5000 TRU2CNTRY by BIG BEAR.

GC396G1 HANG GLIDING by BIG BEAR.

The off roading continued up to the Hang Gliding Cache where we all broke out the food and had a picnic, the view from here was incredible and we were blessed with a beautiful day, great weather and the chance to share it with great friends!

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The road back…

Larry’s trying to find another way out…

Jeep Rubicon Rock Crawling

Image via Wikipedia

Rescuing Snow White


BIG BEAR has a series here locally that is know as his “Snow White Series.”  You have to “rescue” Snow White from the 7 Dwarfs which are 7 caches in the series that contain the pieces of the coordinates that once you put them together in the right sequence get you to the location of cache location called Snow White.  I failed to find Snow White, it seems I was about 200 feet off.  One of the Dwarf caches got muggled and so it is missing its numbers and I guessed, but I guessed wrong and I was losing daylight.

I started at 10:30 am and went until 4:30 and still had to make it back to the Jeep.  The terrain wasn’t hard but you did have to manuver through a couple of canyons and the wind was gusting up to what felt like 40 mph at times, so I didn’t want to be finding my way back in the dark.  It was a nice hike though and my finds for the day totaled 20 Caches for the day, with some really nice views of the snow capped mountains of Mt Shasta, Mt Lassen and the Trinity Alps.

The Caches in the Series (Not in order):

GC1NP3V THE EVIL BIG BEAR.
GC1NP25 CANTSEEM
GC1NKT9 GRAMPS POSSE
GC1NP4Y SNOW WHITE
GC1NKV5 NR. TEACHER
GC1NKW1 Teco Mac
GC1NP2E MR. Dice
GC1NP3F DAIRYVILLE
GC1NP2V SHASTA SAM

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Tru2Cntry doing the Snow White Series

English: Lassen Peak reflected in Manzanita Lake

Image via Wikipedia

San Francisco Virtuals, Webcams & Earthcaches


BIG BEAR & T2C at The Golden Gate Bridge

Nov 27, 2011 – We had a blast on our continued hunt for all the Virtuals in San Francisco. Starting out on Thanksgiving Day on the East Side of San Francisco and continuing our hunt today

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IGOR – GCDE – A very old Cache!


GCDE Igor

Nov 27, 2011 – BIG BEAR and I got up early this morning to make our way to this cache site… its got a very old GC#. This cache fills a spot in our “found for that year and date chart” that we both needed, and that’s why we seek these older caches out.

The terrain/difficulty rating was a 1/1.5… but that was the hardest 1.5 terrain I have ever done,

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Something Old in Vacaville


Christmas Tree Trimming in Vacaville

I have visited Vacaville many times because of the great Factory Outlet Stores they have there, and I use to visit the Nut Tree when it was open years ago, it was a great little place to shop for gifts, and chocolate, it reminded me of a Harry & David’s in Oregon. I was staying in Vacaville last week with BIG BEAR for the Thanksgiving Holiday and while he had to go to work he encouraged me to do the Virtuals in downtown Vacaville. So I loaded up the GPS’r and took off for the day.

I had a great time walking the little Town Hall and learning the History of Vacaville. It just so happened that they were putting up the Christmas Tree and all the trimmings for the Christmas Holiday while I was there. It was a beautiful fall day and I really enjoyed the little town of Vacaville.

I was able to do all 3 Virturals in town, most of the tour took me through the little town and then I drove down to the City Hall and over to the Cemetary to finish the rest of the Tour. I found a 100 Year Old tree, and some old School Bells that used to tell the children in the area that School was about to begin. Vacaville was also home to one of the Pony Express Stops. I have a whole new appreciation for Vacaville besides just coming to shop I got acquainted with its past and I will visit the little Town Square again when I come to town.

Thanksgiving Picnic in Golden Gate Park


BIG BEAR & T2C at Inspiration Point - San Francisco

Nov 24, 2011 What an amazing day…. BIG BEAR and I decided to do all the Geocache Virtuals  we could do in San Francisco. We packed up out Thanksgiving Dinner and headed towards Treasure Island the Read the rest of this entry

BIG BEAR Hits 13,000 Caches!


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On November 7th, 2011 at 10:30 PM, BIG BEAR and I took a moonlit walk to the cache: GC3784H Country Ride & Picnic for Shampoodles #41  and in the light of an almost full moon with the help of flashlights BIG BEAR succesfully signed the log for his 13,000 cache! We celebrated with P-Nut M&M’s and Sparkling Cider in Paper Cups! CONGRATULATIONS BIG BEAR!!

Earlier in the day while we were out Geocaching in the area in pursuit of BIG BEAR’S 13,000 we did this cache: GC34W75 Ponytails sees Cows & Pigs  and had a good time laughing at all the cows that came running over to greet us!!

Susanville’s Smiley Face



Susanville is a great place for cachers to hide series of caches in the shapes of icons. After doing the Valentine Series that is in the shape of a Heart in June I was really looking forward to doing the Peace Sign and the Upside Down Smiley.

This Smiley Face series is placed on the side of a 4000 ft terrain mountain. There are no trails, or “Geotrails” to follow when doing these kinds of series, you are heading straight to each cache via the way the direction the GPS is pointing you in. At times you are bushwhacking, or following an animal trail, so it can be challenge for some cachers.

GC2MGYT SMILEY FACE 1

These caches are not caches series that all cachers can do, you have to know your physical limits, your time limits and know your GPS! You don’t want to run out of daylight, or batteries or water, and always tell somebody where you are!

I went with my good Geofriends: Swimbait and HookRN, and the views from up on top were beautiful. We scored the last Cache in the Series just as the Sun dropped behind the mountain, it had taken us most of the afternoon to hunt down each of the caches that gave us all the “Upside Down Smiley in Susanville. On our way back to the Geomobile, we got the chance to say Hi to the CO, this series is in his backyard and he was there. Thanks for a great series!!

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